Steve Ballmer will receive his next IRS audit notification in 3....2....

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

Ha! Although for all the well-deserved criticism the Feds receive about waste and abuse, My. anecdotal sense is that the degree (if not scale) of that wastage and abuse is worse at the state and local level. He might be more likely to get harassed by something like the local zoning commission than the IRS...

Agreed. There certainly does seem to be more state/local news related to government fraud/waste/abuse. I worked with quite a few federal civil servants during my time in the Marine Corps, and they were some of the stingiest people I've ever met. We used to joke they'd think the funds were coming from their own checking account. Along the same note, I'm now a contractor to the Dept of Interior, the folks I work with are very fiscally frugal as well.

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The secret of a long life is you try not to shorten it.
-Nobody

That's so 2010.

Suddenly, in 2017, someone has decided that Government spending is worthy of study? Really?

We are buried in debt: "On January 26, 2016, debt held by the public was $13.62 trillion or about 75% of the previous 12 months of GDP. Intragovernmental holdings stood at $5.34 trillion, giving a combined total gross national debt of $18.96 trillion or about 104% of the previous 12 months of GDP." (Source: BEA and treasurydirect.gov). The only time in our history we have been so in debt was during WWII. In 1946 we had beaten enemies on two separate continents and were the single superpower on the planet. Today, what do we have to show for our debt load?

Well no, technically someone decided in 2014 that govt spending was worthy of study and then spent the next 3 years bankrolling a small army of people to take a shot at the analysis. I'm not a big Steve Ballmer fan generally, but I give him some credit for trying to tackle this project in what seems to be a serious and comprehensive way. I'm scrolling through the '10-K' that's on the website right now and it's clear that someone put a truckload of work into the project. What I like on first read is that there's an effort to do the analysis across federal, state and local governments and present in a form that's familiar to creatures of corporate America like myself. Part of the reason that discussions seem to get bogged down is that there's significant fragmentation of data, so you never have anything close to a whole picture to look at. At least this project is trying to address that issue.

Well, some of us rich folks are sitting on a much larger pile of (Fed-inflated) funny money than we sat on in 2001, for starters. We tend to vote for our interests unlike vast swaths of the country who vote with their gut. As far as my investments are concerned, I'm pleased with the performance of all 3 most recent administrations :D.

I'm only marginally concerned about the tax man coming to get my money to pay for all this later. Job creators always find ways to hold on to wealth and sell the job creating story to suckers who vote against their interests.

Agree with all that. I'm excited to give this a read sometime over the weekend. Weirdly so, haha.

I like it. Even cataloguing all the people that work for all the levels of government would be a huge undertaking.

Now I need him to pay a bunch of people from all walks of life to record every tax of every type and every governmental use fee or the like they pay for a year.

I've never seen an estimate for what people pay in all taxes. If someone knows of one I'd love to see it. I want federal, state, local, sales, gas, license fees, income, property, use fees, etc.

My gut feeling is that I don't pay too much, but how can I trust my gut if I don't know how much I actually pay?

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I'm beginning to think that we are much more fucked than I thought.